How To Make Your Guitar Sing Pt 4-- Vibrato

Hi everybody! Welcome to yet another element to help you play guitar solos that can grab your listeners by their necks and demand attention. Now I will talk to you about vibrato. This is one technique that is so much neglected that even many shredders do so poorly at.

So what is a good vibrato and how do we do it on guitar. As a general guide, a good vibrato is deep and wide, in contrast to narrow and shallow ones (think of the sound a goat or a sheep makes). They also need to be in time rather than randomly going high and low in pitch. They can be heard from classical or opera singers. 

There are many ways to do it on the guitar and the following two are what I use very often and they can really help you render very rich vibratos. 

The Bent-Note Vibrato 

This is a really straight forward way of doing it. You only need to strengthen up your muscles and be constantly conscious about the changes in pitches that you make. If you remember from the previous article on bending notes, considering you are able to do it already, you can actually start from there.

So pick a note, play it using the string-bending technique and hold it. While sustaining the note (a distortion effect will help for this purpose), bend it a little bit further in such a way the pitch goes up by  a semitone or half step, and then release the bend so that the pitch goes down a half step lower than the  original bent note that you did at the beginning. Now repeat the process for your desired duration and there you go, a very reach vibrato. 

Now refine this by using a metronome so as to train yourself to do it uniformly and in time.

Steve Vai's Circular Vibrato

The inventor of this technique describes it as a combination of the 'rock style' vibrato and the 'classical' vibrato.

The former just deals with bending and releasing the string without bending it before hand to leave room for pitch lowering. So it just starts from the target note, going sharp and the back to the target note again. No flat or lowering down.

The latter deals with simply sliding your finger within a fret or position while sustaining the notes which sharpens and flattens the note to some extent.

So when the two is combined it allows you to go sharp and flat.

To sum things up, a good vibrato is a deliberate act of going sharp and flat (vice versa) around a targeted note in successions to make a note more emotional or tense.

If you combine these techniques with the other techniques that have been discussed, you will sound like a 'pro' even if you don't shred.

How to Make Your Guitar Sing Pt 3: Legato Slide

Hi folks! Welcome to this 'How to make your guitar sing' series. Previously I have talked about string bending and here is another way of putting spice into the each note that you play on the guitar. It is technically called Legato Slide or simply 'slide'.

As the name goes, you literally slide your fretting finger along a string that you are playing while fretting it. The result is a smooth and quick change in pitch.

So just like string bending, this can be used from above or below ('pitch-wise') your target note/pitch. To make things clearer, try playing a C note on the 5th fret of the 3rd string. Then as the note starts to ring out quickly slide (while still fretting) to the 7th fret (D note). 

You can even prolong the first note to make it a two-note phrase instead of having to pick them separately. You can also slide from several frets or even a single fret from above or below at varying speeds to get the necessary nuance you so desire so that your thoughts or emotions are best expressed. Very much like a singer singing!

I have discussed with you known ways of incorporating nuances to the notes you play and there's a few more that I'd like to share to you next time. All these different ways when used together in one musical context make a simple melody sound very interesting. Simple nursery rhymes can sound really killer-like with these.

So keep on experimenting and learn the ways of playing a single note as I have described here and in the previous articles. Until next time.

How To Make Your Guitar Sing Pt 2: The Pre-Bend

Hello folks! I hope you had fun and learned a lot from Part 1 of this article. Now, in this very short article I am going to show you yet another use of the string bending technique.

So as the way it is called, you bend the string before you actually make it sound. It is sort of the reverse of the one we discussed in the previous article. So pick up a note, say C. Next is to bend it so that it hits the note D. Now try to remember how it feels, how hard you have to push the string upward in bending it because in the real playing situation you're not supposed to play or strike the string until you've bent it.

Once you  got this down try playing it and as soon as it sounds (still in D) quickly release the bend to revert back to C.

Just like the regular string bending this technique is very powerful in conveying different emotions. It helps you to be so expressive on the guitar that your listeners would know what it is you're trying to tell them even when there's no lyrics or nobody singing!

Now considering that we have been only dealing with a single note, how much more when we put this one bent note with many other notes? I tell you, you could virtually grab your listeners by he neck and tell them 'Listen to me!'

I'll do a video version of these techniques in the near future so that you will clearly see what I mean. But for now, try to follow, experiment, and have fun!